A bright career cut short

Had the Malegaon blast not happened, 25-year-old journalist Soumya Vishwanathan would have probably been on duty today.

The late night development extended her shift till 3 am In normal days, she would have left much early —and maybe that would have saved her too. Soumya was shot on her way back to her C9, Vasant Kunj home.

"She told her mother that she had to stay back due to the blasts and would be late," said Shobha Balakrishnan, Soumya's aunt.

Soumya was in a hurry to be back home early. For, she was going to meet her elder sister Shubha, who had just come back from Vietnam, after a long time. But fate had other plans for her.

Soumya tried calling up her sister around 1:00 am but could not get through. "She had called up Shubha but was not getting her phone. Then she called up her mother and asked about her sister. Her mother said they might be tired from the long flight and might be sleeping. She said she would try to come back home as early as possible and talk to them," said Shobha Balakrishnan.

Soumya called up her mother around 3:15 am and said she was in Chanakyapuri, just 10 minutes away from home. But she never reached.

"She told me she was on her way. After that, I did not receive any call from her. The next time when I called, the police picked up her phone and told us what had happened," said her mother Madhvi Vishwanathan.

Her close friends still cannot believe that she was shot. "Why would any one kill such a nice person? She never got into any tiff let alone a fight with anyone. I still cannot believe she is no more," said her college friend.

An alumnus of Indian Institute of Mass Communication Dhenkenal, she had been in the profession for five years.